Australopithecine "Big Man" Pigeons Make a Deal, Confused Parasitic Ducks, Bringing up Baby, Keeping the Bees. Web Extras: Fact or Fiction Mosquitos and Dark Clothes, Heat Tolerant Corals, Devonian Fish.

Australopithecine "Big Man"

Kadanuumuu, courtesy Y Haile-Selassie, L Russell, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, PNAS

One of the most famous fossils in anthropology is "Lucy", the Australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Lucy was 3.2 million years old and is seen as an important transitional fossil between our common ancestor with the chimpanzee and early humans. Lucy's skeleton, however, was incomplete and left important questions unanswered about her posture and whether she walked and ran like a human. Now a new, much larger and older skeleton of an Australopithecus has been found and analyzed by Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, University Professor of Biological Anthropology at Kent State University, and his colleagues. This fossil, which they've called Kadanuumuu or "big man" in the Afar language, is also incomplete, but preserves bones that weren't found in Lucy. Dr. Lovejoy says that it confirms that Australopithecine were capable walkers and runners and also suggests that the common ancestor we had with chimpanzees was less like a chimp, and more like a human than we might have previously suspected.

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Pigeons Make a Deal

But they're terrible at Jeopardy

The Monty Hall Dilemma is a tricky problem in probability that is profoundly counter-intuitive for most people. Based on the problem posed in the game show, Lets Make a Deal, it basically asks if you should switch your pick after Monty Hall has shown you that one of the three doors hiding prizes doesn't have the prize. Most humans - including professional mathematicians - misjudge the probability, and choose wrong. However, Dr. Wally Herbranson, a professor of Psychology at Whitman College in Washington, tested his pigeons on a version of the game, and discovered once they'd played it enough to be familiar with it, they chose right every time.

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Related Links

Paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology
LiveScience blog
Dr. Herbranson's profile

Confused Parasitic Ducks

Redhead duck, copyright cc-by-3.0 Kevin Bercaw

Some birds, most famously the European Cuckoo, lay their eggs in other birds' nests. so that they can foist the labour-intensive and costly business of raising chicks - a phenomenon known as "brood parasitism." Dr. Mark Hauber, a professor of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, wondered if this introduced a problem for these chicks. It's well known that the chicks of some birds will "imprint" on whomever raises them - for example, goslings raised by humans behave as if the human is their parent, and think that they're humans as well. Dr. Hauber wondered if this imprinting happens in these parasitic bird chicks, and if it causes them to be confused about which species they are and who is a potential mate. In an experiment with Redhead ducks, which will lay their eggs in other ducks' nests, he found that the parasitic redhead chicks were confused about mates, and courted ducks of their foster-parents' species. This may explain why this kind of parasitism is not more common.

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Related Links
Paper in Royal Society Proceedings Biology
Blog by biologist R. Ford Dension
Dr. Hauber's Lab

Bringing Up Baby

Two male Barbary macaques interacting with an infant. Photo by Dr. Julia Fischer.

Barbary macaque monkeys live in Morocco and Algeria, and they are known for the extended care the males provide for infants. But the purpose of this behaviour has been unclear until it was studied recently. Dr. Julia Fischer, the Head of the Cognitive Ethology Laboratory at the Primate Centre in Gottingen, Germany, has found that male macaques like to take an infant around with them, as a way of bonding with other males, especially males higher in the social order. The infants, not necessarily their own, are used as a kind of passport for friendship. Together, males will hold the infant up, pass it around and make lip smacking noises in approval. Not only does having an infant in tow make a male more approachable, it makes him less likely to be attacked. Even though caring for an infant causes great stress for the male, the ability to bond and improve social status is deemed a worthy trade-off.

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Related Links
Paper in Animal Behaviour
Dr. Fischer's web page
Discover Magazine Blog

Keeping the Bees

There are over 19-thousand species of bees found all over the world, including two species that have been found near the edge of glaciers in the Arctic. It is estimated that bee pollination is key for about one-third of the world's food supply, either directly or indirectly. Bees play a vital role in the ecology of the planet, yet these unsung heroes of the natural world may be at risk. Pesticides, fragmentation of habitat and climate change all pose threats to bees. And according to Laurence Packer, if they are in trouble, then so are we. Dr. Packer is a melittologist and a Professor of Biology at York University in Toronto. In his new book, Keeping The Bees - Why All Bees Are At Risk and What We Can Do to Save Them, he writes about common misconceptions, some of the more exotic species he has encountered, and suggests simple ways ordinary people can help bees. 

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Related Links
Keeping the Bees - Harper Collins
York University news release
Dr. Packer's web page